DVD Studio Pro 3: In the Studio

Templates

There's not a lot to say about the best thing to do with templates (and styles, for that matter) except this: use them! Even if you know your buttons will be used in only one project, make a project-only style out of them. You'll be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to add a last-minute menu for your clients after they OK the "final" copy of the disc.

And we did lie a bit. There's another thing to say about templates and styles. When possible, make them self-contained. This does take up space, but space is cheap and time is not. One round of "spring cleaning" can render an entire project useless. DVDSP politely copies things out of the reach of mortal users, and you always will have the necessary assets available for future projects.

If you must keep the assets linked, just make sure you use a common location so that it's easy to maintain the links. A shared network folder can be a great place to store such things; just make sure no one else can delete them. (Making shared assets read-only also is a good idea.)

Another clever thing about templates is that they can serve as a rudimentary form of copy-and-paste in DVDSP 2.x. There is no facility (yet!) for copying a button and duplicating it in a different menu. Trying to move things to a different project is even more difficult. Making custom styles and templates can be an efficient way to copy pieces of one project and include them in another. When you're done, you always can delete the template or style if you really ...